Future Heritage at Focus/24: The Longer View

As a part of Focus/24: The Longer View, Future Heritage sees the work of 10 makers showing their work in the Design Avenue, with many pieces specially commissioned for the show.

Celebrating its 10th year, Future Heritage is curated by the renowned design journalist and curator Corinne Julius, who has put together a compelling mix of mid-career makers and recent Masters graduates.

All the makers at Future Heritage have been selected by curator Corinne Julius for their innovative approach to materials and design, and the potential contribution they can make to the contemporary interior. Work on display covers a variety of media and disciplines. This year’s Future Heritage makers include:

Elliott Denny?is making a series of screens and coffee tables for both interior and exterior use, produced by self-developed extrusion techniques. Elliott is a London-based ceramics designer, who is inspired by the intersection between industrial and studio ceramics and how these approaches can be interwoven. The work often engages with?historical ceramic narratives, reinterpreting them for a contemporary context. Elliott's work takes the form of sculpture, furniture and products, utilising a wide range of ceramic processes, incorporating self-built?production devices and innovative techniques.

Esna Su?is developing a new range of lighting based on her more conceptual practice. She is renowned for her textile work about refugees. Esna’s practice subtly explores the issues of identity and?memory and how these are shaken in the context of political instability. She envelops her pieces with?heritage, using traditional Turkish techniques of weaving, twining, needlework and crochet. For Future Heritage she is knitting and weaving strips of leather into a new range of lighting.

Mandy Coppes-Martin?is making delicate wall hangings. Originally a visual artist from South Africa, she specialises in making both?2 and 3-dimensional artworks using a variety of mediums such as paper thread, raw un-spun silks, as well as vintage leather gloves, fish bones and collected antique lace that embodies a life once lived. She creates textile sculptures and drawings by incorporating and embedding these materials into almost woven reconstituted structures that become tangible links to the past.

Hanna Fastrich?is a recent Master’s graduate making furniture in metal mesh and ceramics. She is an interdisciplinary maker based in London and Munich. She studied Applied Arts (Ceramics & Glass) at the Royal College of Art after originally training as an architect. She has been expanding her creative work through ceramics, Japanese woodworking and metalwork. Concerned with human connection, Hanna’s work plays with the formal language of an age-old ritual of human gathering: communal dining. Her assemblages are made up of ceramic sculptural vessels and steel mesh: their indents contain piles of food formed out of clay, inspired by still life Old Master paintings and abstracted through the properties of Majorelle blue. They can be seen as sculptural?furniture that encourages gathering.

Tessa Silva?is developing a range of organically shaped furniture using milk by-products. Tessa is a British-Brazilian artist, with an interest in the impact of materials on society and what they can reveal anthropologically. Consumed by a fascination with milk, Tessa’s research has resulted in the manipulation of milk proteins to produce bespoke sculptural objects. Working predominantly with a unique, but historically originated, formula of surplus milk (sourced from an organic dairy farm) to create a sculpting material free from synthetics, she utilises a precious raw?material to ?create functional furniture.?

Borja Moranta?is creating architectural porcelain installations. Originally from Asturias, northern Spain, Borja settled in Edinburgh after graduating as an architect in 2016. His ceramic practice began in 2018, as part of a recovery process from a severe surgery due to nerve damage on his left hand. Starting at Edinburgh Ceramics Workshop, he set up his own studio in 2020 and now focuses solely on his ceramic practice. He is a renowned maker of functional works beloved by chefs and restaurateurs. His new work is an artistic departure, created especially for Future Heritage. Borja's ceramics reflect the states of?mind he experiences while working with clay and its physical processes: from the mindfulness of throwing?to the physicality of preparing clay or the natural slow pace behind the steps that clay follows to become a?ceramic piece.

Richard McVetis?has a following for?his exquisite?hand-embroidered small-scale works, but for Future Heritage he is developing large-scale pieces. His practice centres around drawing and process, specifically hand embroidery. Through his work, he explores ideas of repetition and expressions of sameness and difference within repetition, traversing themes of geology, cosmology, the language of time, permanence and?impermanence. In a new body of work, he will transform the intimacy of his miniature works into the monumental – embracing and leveraging the sculptural, architectural, and functional possibilities of textiles to shape space.

Nicholas Lees?is creating a new range of wall-based sculptural ceramics for Future Heritage. He will be showing pieces demonstrating the cusp between two bodies of work in?ceramic, alongside related ink drawings. There will be new, ambitious pieces made through throwing and lathe turning porcelain – an unusual technique for which he has become internationally known. Nick displays a rare level of skill in conception and making. Alongside the lathe vessels, there will be new wall-mounted decorative ‘Fluxworks’ – visually distinct, but part of a thread of exploration into ideas of threshold, liminality, perception, materiality and?time.

Shivangi Vasudeva?is a new Master’s graduate from Central St Martins. She is designing wooden and textile furniture based on traditional cultures in India, aimed at helping to support threatened crafts and communities. Her project ‘The Alchemy of our Fibers’ responds to her conversations with the Naga community in northeast India and the impact of their liminal identities between nature and humanity. Rooted in Nagaland's folklore, furniture forms are imbued with vibrant material culture that connects to the spirits of the forest. Delicately balancing unexpected volumes, the collection includes low seating and a screen that emphasise horizontality, fostering a bond between people and land, echoing Asian traditions. The textiles, woven using the indigenous loin loom, are a collaboration between Shavangi and Naga artisans.

Ane Christensen?is a Danish London-based metal artist celebrating 25 years in practice this year. At Future Heritage, she will show her signature sculptural wall pieces, vessel forms and candlesticks and, for the first time, explore furniture with a one-off abstract ‘Ghost’ shelf. Colour is integral to Ane's work, applied through powder coating, patination and experimental use of artist pigments.?Her work engages with the themes of balance, light and negative space.